Oh, the joy of such companionship! But, oh, the slowness of the mails!
A month passed, and Ezra was beginning to give up all hope of ever having an answer to his letter, when one day it came, a dainty envelope with the Claybank postmark.
Miss Musgrove thanked him for his letter. She would see him. It would not be convenient now, but would he not come down to the academy's closing exercises in June—a month later? Until then she was very respectfully his friend, Myrtle Musgrove.
The next month was the longest in Ezra's life. Still, the Lord's calendar is faithful, and the sun not a waiter upon the moods of men.
In twenty-nine days exactly a timid little man stood with throbbing heart at the door of Claybank Academy, and in a moment more he had slipped into a back seat of the crowded room, where a young orator was ringing Poe's "Bells" through all the varying cadences of his changing voice to a rapt audience of relations and friends. Here unobserved Ezra hoped to recover his self-possession, remove the beads of perspiration one by one from his brow with a corner of his neatly folded handkerchief, and perhaps from this vantage-ground even enjoy the delight of recognizing Miss Myrtle without an introduction.
He had barely deposited his hat beneath his chair when there burst upon his delighted vision a radiant, dark-eyed, red-haired creature in pink, sitting head and shoulders above her companions on a bench set at right angles with the audience seats, in front of the house. There were a number of women in the row, and they were without bonnets. Evidently these were the teachers, and of course the pink goddess was Miss Myrtle Musgrove.
Ezra never knew whether the programme was long or short. The bells had tintinabulated and musically welled into "Casabianca" which, in turn, had merged into "The Queen o' the May," and presently before he realized it Freedom was ringing in the closing notes of "America," and everybody was standing up, pupils filing out, guests shaking hands, babel reigning, and he had seen only a single, towering, handsome woman in all the assembly.
Indeed, it had never occurred to him to doubt his own intuition, until suddenly he heard his own name quite near, and turning quickly, he saw a stout matronly woman of forty years or thereabouts standing beside him, extending her hand.
Every unmarried woman is a "young lady" by courtesy south of Mason and Dixon's line.
"I knew you as soon as I saw you, Mr. Slimm," she was saying. "I am Miss Musgrove. But you didn't know me," she added, archly, while Ezra made his bravest effort at cordiality, seizing her hand in an agony which it is better not to attempt to describe.